-on everything she wants to ;)

(These are some final notes on the book Semantic Universals in Indian Languages by Anvita Abbi, which includes Chapter 4 and Conclusions chapter. All previous articles in this series can be seen here.)
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Soliloquy: Now, I had big time troubles with chapter 4 – so I could not take much notes as I did not understand much. But, I will still try to write down what I understood. Reg my troubles, first, the examples were unclear about the phenomenon they are supposed to explain. Second, in each language, a different sentence was taken. So, I could not see what actually is being shown through those examples. Thirdly, the language used was way too academic for me (may be I should not complain about this part at least, but may be I can, because I am not a linguist!). Finally, in general, it appeared to me that the goals of this chapter were fuzzy.
(Disclaimer: All the above opinions are mine and only mine. As a reader, I have the right to say I had trouble understanding certain things in someone’s book!)

Enter the dragon:

Idea: “Languages of the South-Asian subcontinent do make a distinction between ‘subjects’ who act, do, or perform an action from ‘subjects’ who undergo, experience, have, become or any such phenomenon which is ‘out of control’ of the subject nominal”. The ‘non-performative’ kind of actions are mostly feelings like like/dislike, hunger, pain, etc., Now, as far as I understood, this chapter is a discussion on this aspect.
(Actually, they call even “thinking” non-performative but I am still wondering why!)

“… further points out an interesting paradox that these languages describe such subjective experience (which are a kind of internalized states and experiences) from an ‘external point of view’ that is by putting the experiencing subject in oblique case and either making the experience itself the grammatical subject or, less commonly, using an impersonal (and generally deleted) grammatical subject.”

******
There are four sections in this chapter:
1. Non experiential constructions
2. Experiential constructions
3. Semantic Typology
4. Linguistic Encoding
5. Discussions on what is dative? what is subject etc.
(With some difficulty I managed to understand the first 3 sections.)
******
Section-1

“A nominal element can be in possession of alienable or inalienable entities .. .. many of the South Asian languages mark the possessor NP distinctly from the non-possessor or agnetive NP”

The examples here were not so clear to me, but here is what I understood after a discussion through examples, with a friend who is not a linguist but the native speaker of a different language. (We just took the sentences mentioned here and checked how they look in our respective languages to understand what the author is suggesting)

So, if I say “I have two hands”, I say: “నాకు రెండు చేతులు ఉన్నాయి”/मुझे दो हाथ है (someone might also say: “मेरे को दो हाथ है”) ; But if I say – I have two umbrellas, I say – “నా దగ్గర రెండు గొడుగులు ఉన్నాయి/मेरे पास दो छाते है; (because hands are my inalienable possession unless I meet with a horrible accident.) Although its not mentioned here, there are fuzzy cases like: “వాడికి బోలెడు డబ్బుంది” vs “వాడి దగ్గర బోలెడు డబ్బుంది”. But the point is: “All the possessive constructions are translatable by “have” in English.”

******

I did not understand the rest of this chapter much, at least not as much that I could write my own notes. So skipping it. I am in urgent need of a refresher course on parts of speech and basic grammar🙂

*******
An excerpt from the conclusion chapter of the book:

“Our investigation into the semantic structures of expressives, echo formations, word reduplication, explicators, and non agentive subjects reveal a very significant aspect about the Indian languages and its users. It is mostly those semantic constructs which pertain to perceptive and sensory abilities of a human being that materialize in structural cognates. These abilities are predetermined by specific socio-cultural environment of the speakers of the region. We can ask ourselves that why don’t we find structural resemblances without parallel resemblances in meaning? Or why we don’t we find varying or different linguistic structurations for same or similar semantemes? Why five senses of perception manifest themself in expressives? Why passivity or out of control situation is encoded by oblique marking on the subject nominal? Or why inadvertent action is manifested in the use of an explicator? Surely, these are neither chance resemblances nor genetic inheritences. These are language contact induced phenomena, which, having crossed the barriers of history and geography, have sustained in the various speech communities over a long period of time.

What is obscure till date is the process of this diffusion and convergence. But what is transparent is the fact that in a language contact situation, many of the languages change drastically. Drastic enough to surprise any historical linguist. To him they might appear as ‘sister’ languages not being able to segregate historical affinity from areal affinity. Transparency is also reflected in the typology of these languages which undergoes a change and becomes like that of adjacent languages irrespective of the genetic or typological leanings of the latter.

The homogenized signifier-significant relationship that holds between diverse languages of India is a unique feature that reflects a nation with strong and stable multilingual community. Perhaps, it is in the interest of all of us not to have it disturbed by artificial forces like monolingualism and reduction in the domains of language use.”

I started reading Dr Peri Bhaskara Rao’s “Reduplication and Onomatopoeia in Telugu”, which on one hand is very interesting and on the other hand raises too many questions within me. Perhaps because its zooms in more into one language, which happens to be my language (with a different dialect), i am getting to notice things I did not notice while reading the chapter on same stuff in “Semantic Universals..”.

Anyway, end of story for this book. Interesting book which perhaps would have been better with some editing and proof reading.

(This is some notes on the Chapter 3 : Explicator Compound Verbs and Indian World View, from the book Semantic Universals in Indian Languages by Anvita Abbi. All previous articles in this series can be seen here.)
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Explicator Compound Verbs (ECV), by author’s definition are those verbs which are compounds consisting two verbs V1, V2 where V2 is mostly used to modify or explicate V1, usually representing the tense, mood and aspect of V1. Examples are words like: వెళ్ళి-పోయాడు, बैठ-गया etc., There can be more than two verbs too here. Also, these explicator verbs can be multi-functional. They can indicate one action or another depending on which verb it is being used with. (I kept hyphens to show that there are two verbs there. I at least, never see them as two words by default).

So, this chapter is about such verb formations in various Indian languages, what sort of V2 combine with what sort of V1 etc., The first verb is called a polar verb/main verb/principal verb. The second one is called explicator verb/operator/vector/auxiliary/intensive auxiliary/light verb (I think the choice of one of these terms also depends on what language you are talking about).

Broadly, the kind of “meaning” conveyed in these constructions are of three types.
* Aspectual : used to indicate completion, perfectivity etc.,
e.g, చెప్పాను vs చెప్పేశాను (చెప్పి-వేశాను); मारना vs मार देना etc.,
(For those who want to be entertained – try giving some of these words to google translate and translate to English :p)
“..when the notion of perfectivity is used by varying language speakers it is variously seen to mean i) event or action seen as a whole; ii) action thoroughly or exhaustively done; c) completeley done action; iv) total achievement – in different languages. Clearly, all these belong to the same semantic field and it is this we take as significant. The various in the semantic constructs is due to different “world views”.

(These examples are my concoctions. I am still trying to understand the fine grained classification)
“To conclude, we may say that the explicators in South Asian Languages are drawn from similar lexical sets and are used with main verbs in the respective languages in private contrast with simple verbs, to indicate similar types or range of meanings. Inspite of such such sharing at lexico-semantic level, one can identify typical Indo Aryan explicators and typical Dravidian explicators. .. .. One can identify a typical explicator meaning of a specific language family. .. .. At the level of actual manifestations such as sound sequences or a length of a word, or a number of explicators and their individual meanings etc., it is true that the languages show differences but they are strikingly similar from the point of view of the semantic parameters involved.”

My comments: On the whole, I found the phenomenon interesting and more interesting considering that it is a special feature of certain languages around my homeland. But, the chapter seemed to have been written in a hurry. Things are abrupt. It could have been expanded a bit. Tables come in the middle of the text and run for several pages etc., But, it gives a lot of food for thought.

Also, I got a feeling that people translating from Indian languages to English would be better translators with the knowledge of these linguistic phenomenon. No, I do not have any empirical evidence to prove this. It was just a “feeling” while reading about these things that exist in say Hindi and not in English or viceversa.

– “Semantic Typology of Explicator Compound Verbs in South Asian languages, Anvita Abbi and Devika Gopalakrishnan. Read online here. They seem to equate ECV with compound verbs and serial verbs. But, others seem to make distinctions. This article seemed to be more compact and well-written compared to the chapter in the book I am reading.

(Continued from yesterday’s post, on the same chapter. This is some notes on the Chapter 2 : Areal Typology of Expressives, Echo-formations and Word reduplication. from the book Semantic Universals in Indian Languages by Anvita Abbi. All previous articles in this series can be seen here.)
*****

Other kinds of Lexical Reduplication:

After Echo words, it is a reduplication of a “discontinuous” type where a syllable is inserted between two reduplicated words (e.g., कम से कम, कभी न कभी, कही न कही – drop a comment if you have a good Telugu example. I can’t think of it at the moment).

Then, there is Semantic Reduplication, where related words join together to form compounds. These can be synonyms (like in పండుగా పబ్బం, धनदौलत – alright may be the Telugu example is not a compound. It perhaps is written as two seperate words!) or antonyms (like in మంచీచెడూ, उठना बैठना etc.,) or related words (అన్నపానాలు? मोल-तोल etc) – but, as per the author, “such compounts are part of language universals and do not interest us specifically for the investigation under consideration”.

Then comes “Complete Word Reduplication” (CWR) which are the constructions like – “వింటూ వింటూ నిద్రపోయాను”, बैठे बैठे सोगया etc.,)..and these are very productive ways of forming words. For a change, I would like to type in the author’s examples from Kharia language (the language spoken by the Kharia tribe near Jharkhand) instead of Hindi or Telugu…because I found them interesting.

“reduplicated verbal adverbs of our “baithe baithe” types are universally used by all South Asian languages to indicate aspects like simultaneity, continuity, iteration, sequentiality and non precipitiveness. This is one feature which marks the South Asian languages distinct from neighbouring languages. It gives the languages of the subcontinent a group identity.”

And then, there is interesting comment on how geo-political plurals block this sort of areal diffusion (of certain linguistic structures occuring in all languages of that area irrespective of their genesis) – by taking an example of Taizang, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Burma border.

So, end of story for this chapter. The next chapter is on “Explicator Compound Verbs” (like – కూర్చుండిపోయాను, मारडाला etc., where there are two verbs, where the main meaning is in the first verb but the second verb is used bereft of its meaning, to convey tense, mood and aspect).

(Continued from yesterday’s post, on the same chapter. This is some notes on the Chapter 2 : Areal Typology of Expressives, Echo-formations and Word reduplication. from the book Semantic Universals in Indian Languages by Anvita Abbi. All previous articles in this series can be seen here.)
*****

After “Expressives”, which is “Morphological Reduplication”, the next thing that was dealt with in this book was “Lexical Reduplication” or word reduplication, which is also an important areal feature that originated due to language contact.

Echo-words: In these, the base word form is followed (చలీగిలీ) or in some cases preceded (కొట్టకొస) by an echo word. In the “followed” cases, the echo word is formed “by replacing the initial syllable of the word in question by another syllable (this syllable varies from language to language) keeping intact the canonical shape of the word. Most often, it copies the initial vowel.”
e.g, खाना वाना; इंग्लिक्ष विंग्लिश – has the first vowel copied in the echo word. But, Dravidian languages it seems don’t follow the trend. In Telugu, for example – we say: “చలీ గిలీ” but also “పువ్వూ గివ్వూ” instead of “పువ్వూ గువ్వూ”. So, the echo forming syllable is gi- or ki- in Telugu (and other Dravidian languages) while it is v+base word’s first syllable for say Hindi. The author stuck to only examples from Hindi and South Indian languages here. So, I don’t have any idea what happens in other languages like Bangla say. From a single Bangla example, I managed to understand that its -t- instead of -v- for Bangla.

Apart from this kind of echo-formations, Dravidian languages also form echo by preceding the base-word with a word formed by repeating the first syllable of the base word and adding -tta or -rra to this (e.g, పట్టపగలు, విర్రవీగు, కట్టకడపటి etc.,). There are also పొలంపుట్రా, నగానట్రా etc., (The author suggests refering to Korada Mahadeva Sastri’s and M.Selvam’s books for further reading on this topic. They are mentioned at the end of this post).

Note: “Nouns are the most echoed grammatical category. Verbs, adjectives, pronouns and personal pronouns are echoed but the frequency is much less than found in the nominal category.”

Now comes another interesting phenomenon, where two valid unrelated words from the lexicon combine to form a new compound word, in which the second word delexicalizes itself and serves as an echo word to give a connotation of “generality” or “etc.

I was really fascinated by these echo-words when I met a linguist acquaintance during that short US trip 2,3 weeks back. He pointed out to me these kind of syllable difference between Hindi, Telugu and Tamil which I never noticed so far. After that, I accidentally found this book. Very interesting examples… (Now, this paragraph is a digression and soliloquy!)

Another interesting kind of echo-word where both the words are valid words …but combine together to give a completely different meaning is: “गाजर मूली” which is supposed to mean “insignificant”.

So, these examples raise an important question – should these echo words be defined from the meaning point of view or just from a sounding similarity point of view. The author says – the constructions like “गाजर मूली” would be considered as a compound word where the components lose their original meaning.

Now, the author also distinguishes between “semantic echoing” and “functional echoing”.

semantic echoing: When we say – “caay-vaay”, we mean, tea and other eatables that we can have with it.

functional echoing: When we say “pyaala-vyaala”, we refer to any container of a cup type.

(It seems so difficult to distinguish between these two!!! I need more practice I guess.)

This part on echo-words is concluded thus:

“It is clear that echo formations in Indian languages share their structural configuration as well as the associated semantic parameters across language families and language typologies. These structures manifest generality, casualness, nonspecificity, extremities and group identities. …”

Side comments: Actually, there is “అప్పుడప్పుడు”, which is an echo-word but is also a word combined by a different Sandhi compared to “పట్టపగలు”. There was no such topic of Sandhi in the discussion so far in this chapter. I find it interesting though!

This is some notes on the Chapter 2 : Areal Typology of Expressives, Echo-formations and Word reduplication. from the book “Semantic Universals in Indian Languages” by Anvita Abbi. All previous articles in this series can be seen here.

***

Some terminology:

* “Reduplication” is a phenomenon in which all or part of a word repeats to form another word (e.g., ఇంటింటి, घर घर etc.,). This reduplication is of two types: Lexical Reduplication and Morphological Reduplication.

Lexical Redup. is when whole words repeat themselves, as in the above example. Morphological Reduplication is when parts of words repeat and the individual parts don’t have an independent meaning (e.g., चाचा). This chapter primarily discusses different kinds of reduplication, broadly classified in to “expressives”, “echo words”, “semantic reduplication”

* Expressives: Under the umbrella of reduplication, there are certain kind of reduplicated words which are formed by repeating syllables that constitute a word instead of words itself. Now, this entire reduplicated word functions as a word. These are called “Expressives” in linguistics. (Atleast this is how I understood it).

A definition of “expressives” from the Encyclopaedia Britannica is as follows:

“Expressive language and wordplay are embodied in a special word class called “expressives.” This is a basic class of words distinct from verbs, adjectives, and adverbs in that they cannot be subjected to logical negation. They describe noises, colours, light patterns, shapes, movements, sensations, emotions, and aesthetic feelings.”

* Word-reduplication : These are the ఇంటింటి, घर घर etc., kind of words.

Now in to detail:

Expressives

* “the most significant aspect of Indian expressives is that they indicate five senses of perception of Indian speakers. Secondly, the expressives behave and function like any regular word and thus form a part of the lexicons of Indian languages.”

The author gave numerous examples of expressives that cover five senses .. and in multiple Indian languages. I would probably write one example each, in Telugu if possible or give author’s Hindi example if a Telugu one does not occur to me.

1. Acoustic noises: కావ్ కావ్ మని అరవడం, కిలకిలమని నవ్వడం, ఘల్లు ఘల్లుమని గజ్జెల చప్పుడు, टप टप etc.,
2. Sense of sight: జిగేల్ జిగేల్మని మెరవడం, चम चम.
3. Sense of touch: perhaps, వేడివేడిగా qualifies here (author’s examples were from Nepali and Methei).
4. Sense of smell: ఘుమఘుమ వాసనలు
5. Sense of taste: चिरपिरा, चटपटा (I thought of కరకరా… and realized it comes under sound and not taste)
“Another feature which makes the South Asian languages distinct from other languages is the use of expressives as manner adverbs. This use gives Indian speaker the linguistic facility in bringing out very minute and subtle distinctions in a performance of an action which may go unnoticed or unexpressed in non-Indian culture. .. It should be noted that learning these languages implies learning of these expressives as a sentence without a definite manner adverb is considered incomplete. The knowledge of expressives thus constitute an integral part of language competence.”

And there were these amazing array of walking style examples from Khasi language..where different sounds indicate different walking styles. Few examples:
don don – toddle like a child
mareh thrait thrait – to run without losing hope or vigor
kniah kniah – walking mincingly

An equivalent example in Telugu could be the laughs – కిల కిలా, పక పకా etc.,

Another interesting tidbit: “Nepali excels in expressing various types of confusion and disorderliness by expressives. At least 15 different expressives to represent disorderliness have been noticed by the author”

It was in this context that I read “పుటుక్కు జరజర…” puzzle in new light.

Another research tidbit: Emeneau (1969) showed that there were at least 39 sound-meaning correspondences of Onomatopoetic across Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages. (Here is a nice interview with him in Telugu)

Onomatopoeia – indicates a sound-meaning correspondence. Like – కావ్ కావ్, కర కరా, భౌ భౌ, काव काव etc., In general linguists say that these formations are not dependent on the rules of the language. But in his book, also based on Emeneau’s work, the author argues that it can also be an areal feature (feature of a linguistic area).

Here is a summary of this part on expressives:
“Indian expressives manifest feelings, sensations, perceptions pertaining to five senses, manner of an action and disorderliness. All these relate to the ability of PERCEPTION of the speaker in a cultural environment. The ‘world view’ and its manifestation in expressive morphology is a typical feature of Indian linguistic area’.

(All blog posts in this series can be accessed here.)
The Book: Semantic Universals in Indian Languages – by Anvita Abbi
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I began re-reading the book from the beginning, so that I can make some useful notes. Here are some comments by the author, from the Intro section, that establishes what this book is about by introducing the basic terminology.

“An area comprising of common linguistic features shared by various genealogically unrelated languages is known as “Linguistic Area“. We can extend the definition of linguistic area to incorporate also those languages which were originally typologically diverse but later shift to homogeneity due to contact situation. This implies that if a linguistic feature with its corresponding semanteme is found in various typologically and genetically diverse languages of a contiguous area then that particular feature is an areal universal. A bundle of such areal universals will mark a strong semantic unity among its diverse languages. Besides, wide existence and use of such features in various languages will confuse the comparative methodologist, as he has no way of isolating ‘structural cognates’ from what he calls ‘real cognates’.”

So, the book basically is about identifying some of these areal features across Indian languages belonging to different linguistic families (e.g., Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman etc.,). Here are the issues that are considered:

I understood and enjoyed reading the chapters on first 2 phenomena better and the 3rd one made me realize that I should borrow a grammar of modern Telugu and understand it first. (So, borrowed “A Grammar of Modern Telugu” by Krishnamurti & Gwynn. I hope I progress!).

I hope to put in some notes for these chapters here as days pass by in this week!

I was fascinated by the idea of the book … Semantic Universals and hence picked it up in the library. Hopefully, I will write a few blog posts jotting down my notes and some interesting tidbits.

(The book: Semantic Universals in Indian Languages by Anvita Abbi)

While reading about expressive words, I saw the Telugu story – “puTukku jara jara Dubukku mE” in a new light, thanks to the paragraph by Prof. Peri Bhaskararao that was quoted in this book.

“There is an interesting folk puzzle in Telugu which exposes the general contention that the knowledge of expressives and their semantic correlates are considered a pre-requisite to man’s intelligence. Once a king used an expressive “puTukku jara jara Dubukku mE” as a puzzle to be solved by one of his court poets. The king apparently saw something while taking a round of his kingdom. The poet, having pondered over it for sometime, solves the mystery of the expressives in the following way:

“There was a small hut with a thatched roof. A bottlegourd creeper had spread all over the roof of the hut. The creeper bore many bottle gourds. One day one of the fruits got disconnected from the twig (producing the noise puTukku) and quickly rolled down (producing the noise jara jara). There was a goat resting underneath the edge of the roof. The bottle gourd fell on the goat (producing the sound Dubukku). When the gourd fell on the goat, the goat cried mE.”
-Peri Bhaskararao, 1977”

***
(The book has innumerable number of typos and perhaps needed some editing. But I enjoyed reading parts of it, learnt a lot through it and closed it with a lot of questions)

రచయిత రాసిన ఈ వాక్యాలు నాకు బాగా నచ్చాయి.
“It is well known that Panini and the Paniniyas were Sabdapramanikah, those who regard speech patterns as authority. Patanjali has said (which has often been quoted): ‘we accept the authority of the speech. What speech tells us is what we depend upon (for deciding issues)’. This, I believe, means that we should put stress on the point that grammar is not concerned with ontology (or semantics, i.e, things and events) but with what people actually say, or rather how people speak of things and events. Paninin’s Karaka categories fit in well with this point and hence we can easily account for such usages as ‘sthali pachati’, ‘the cauldron cooks’, although we know very well that the cauldron is the substrate where cooking takes place, not the agent of cooking. But philosophically, one can think of the cauldron as a contributing factor to the action of cooking and some agency may be attributed to it.”

“What is Karaka? అన్న ప్రశ్నకి పదిహేను-పదహారో శతాబ్దపు నవ్య నైయాయికులు ఒక పరిష్కారం సూచించారు. రచయిత మాటల్లో –
“Bhavananda says that a Karaka, both in its principal sense and its secondary sense, is to be defined as that which is syntactically connected (anvayin) with the action verb through the intermediary of the meaning of vibhaktis (the so-called case-affixes). It is clear here that the karaka categories are intermediaries between the semantic interpretation and grammatical suffixes.
… …
Thus, Bhavananda at the end says that the correct definition would be as follows. A Karaka is what is syntactically connected with the action verb (anvita) and is endowed with any one of the six properties or powers: agenthood, objecthood, instrumentality, recipienthood, apadanatva ‘being fixed point of departure’ and locushood.”

* ఇదే అంశాలపై పతంజలి అభిప్రాయం: “…it is neither the universal cowhood nor the individual cow nor its qualities nor its actions. He replies that the word ‘cow’ is ‘that by utterance of which there is a comprehension of the object having the dewlap, the tail, hump, the hoofs, and the horns (all taken together).'” అలాగే, పతంజలి ప్రకారం – “…four classes of words upon the distinction of their ‘occasioning ground or basis’ (nimitta): they are class names, quality names, action names and arbitrary names or proper names.”
-దీని పై పాయింటు చదువుతున్నప్పుడు మరి మామూలు పేర్ల సంగతేంటి? అనుకుంటూ ఉన్నా. పతంజలి చెప్పింది బాగుంది నాకు🙂

* “Bhartrhari’s main of language is ofcourse, that each linguistic unit, a letter or a word or a sentence, is actually an invariant sphota (varna sphota, pada sphota, vakya sphota), i.e., an invariant, sequenceless and partless ‘whole’ entity which is only manifested by the corresponding audible noise in speech. And at the level of sphota, a linguistic unit and its meaning or the thought it supposedly conveys are one and undifferentiated.”
… ….
“Hence we can say that such a functional property characterizes each member of the cow class and only such members, and the presence of some abstract but ontologically real universal, cow hood, is not needed in order to make use of the class-name “cow” to denote cows.”

Yaska’s contribution however lay in singling out two main (ontological) categories, a process or an action and an entity or a being or thing. L.Sarup chose to contrast these two, “bhava” and “sattva” by using the familiar terminology of “becoming” and being”

“It seems that both theories contain some grains of truth. If we believe in conventionalism, then, in an extreme interpretation, language becomes entirely dependent on the whims of the language user. … .The introduction of God as the first creator of convention was meant to avoid such absurd consequences. The Eternalist has also made one important point regarding the givenness of the language and the word-object connection. Within a given linguistic community, the connection C cannot be easily tampered with. The debate between the Eternalist and the conventionalist may well reveal the point that there is some justification for accepting a theory like sphota theory of language, according to which the word and its linguistic meaning both remain undistinguished in the mind of the competent speaker as well as the competent hearer.”